


There Are Dangerous Things

by SaltCore



Series: We Get What We Deserve [4]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Hanzo's POV, Language, M/M, POV Second Person, Protective Hanzo Shimada, Shimada Dragons, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-10
Updated: 2018-09-10
Packaged: 2019-07-10 11:04:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15948059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SaltCore/pseuds/SaltCore
Summary: There's no time.There's no time, and you have strength to borrow. Take it, damn the cost. You'll do anything that means you keep living in a world with Jesse in it.





	There Are Dangerous Things

Blood pours freely from your broken—again, _fuck_ —nose, pooling behind your lower lip faster that you can spit it away. The taste of copper does nothing to slow your madly racing thoughts. Or rather, the single thought repeating on loop—

_You are both going to die here_

Bunch your fists for the hundredth time and pull, but the thick plastic at your wrists doesn’t give. The skin stretched taunt over the bones of your wrists does. It weeps feebly, stings with the accumulated dirt and sweat under the cuffs. Grit your teeth, trying to alleviate the frustration. Only accomplish making your jaw hurt too.

Jesse is shoved down into the dirt across from you, his hands zip tied behind him like yours are. Meet his eyes. Almost regret it. Your stomach twists at the sight, because he doesn’t look frightened or angry, just tired. Resigned. You can see it in his face, that he’s already done the math.

He knows he’s about to die.

It will be him now, and you later. Jesse is worth a princely sum even as a corpse, and a corpse poses none of the risk a highly trained black ops specialist does. You, on the other hand, are only worth something alive. Your family, what little is left, wants you dead on their terms and no one else’s. You’ve already caught a glimpse of the single battered cryopod sitting in the back of a van. With the lid open it looks like a coffin, and it might as well be. You’re dead the moment they shove you inside. The damnable thing is so old, however, you think it might fatally malfunction before you made it to Japan. Hope it does, out of pure spite. Hope that, when they open it on the other side of the world, the rotting slurry of your remains ruins someone’s suit.

The bounty hunters bicker around you, shoving and shouting. Don’t spare them any attention. Focus instead on Jesse. Jesse, with a line of dried blood stretching from his temple to his beard. Jesse, with his dark, piercing eyes. Jesse, with his head still held high even now.

Distantly, register that the bickering has stopped. That silence has fallen. See one walk toward Jesse out of your peripheral vision, hear the crunch of his boots on the gravel. He pulls a gun from his hip. A small caliber pistol, likely a .22. The bounty hunter pulls back the slide, the metal _schnick_ thunderous. Jesse doesn’t react, doesn’t break eye contact.

Like he wants the last thing he sees to be you.

He mouths something, words you have heard, have felt pressed into your skin over and over—

_I love you_

Your throat clenches shut. This can’t be happening. You can’t be about to watch Jesse die. You aren’t ready to lose him. You aren’t ready, but you’re about to, and that knowledge sinks its teeth into the pulped fragments of your soul and rips a new hole open.

Jesse’s nostrils flare as the nose of the pistol presses hard into the thin skin of his skull, just behind his ear—the only concession Jesse makes to anything like fear. He’s so brave. He’s so damn brave, and it doesn’t matter.

Your heart hammers in your chest, your blood loud in your ears. Expect the report of the pistol, clench every muscle in preparation. Shake with the effort. _Ragepanicgrief_ triggers your instinct for fight or flight, but you can do neither. Feel a buzz under your skin, like stepping on a live wire. But that’s not you, you realize, a little late. It’s _them_.

They are awake.

Their attention is a crashing wave, and the suddenness of it steals the air from your lungs. They reach out around you, curious. Many handed, they fumble over the people, over the landscape. Looking for something. The source of your distress, perhaps.

They demand your attention, and you push them away. You need to be present for the world while Jesse is still in it. Feel the hot rush of their displeasure. Ignore it as it churns your stomach. It will be any second now, that man will pull the trigger, and Jesse will slump forward, extinguished.

They wrench your attention away, briefly graying out your vision.

_Attack_

You have no weapon, nothing to direct them. What could they possibly do?

_Trustattack_

The incantation is heavy on your tongue, waiting to be spoken. Trust in something you don’t truly comprehend doesn’t come easy, but your desperation is real. There is no time. It doesn’t matter if they’re wrong. There is no outcome worse that the one that follows your inaction.

Let the words of the incantation fall from your lips like curses.

The cold is all consuming, complete cessation. It is unbeing, is awful equilibrium, is death. And then, femtoseconds or eons later, there is fire, there is fury. They burst into existence, rattling your bones within you, burning the air around you. The world snaps into perfect crystalline clarity, and you can see _everything_.

The plastic at your wrists melts away. Lunge forward—there are billions of possibilities for what happens next. Most are dominated by the way the bullet bounces around the inside of Jesse’s skull, which is in turn determined by manufacturing idiosyncrasies from months or years ago. Those long tails wind back into innumerable pasts and are nothing but distraction. Seize on the branch of probability where Jesse lives, wrench it into actuality. Catch the bounty hunter by the throat, sending his shot wild, away from Jesse.

The bounty hunters start to raise their weapons. You can see every one of them at once, because you have eyes to spare. Crush the throat in your hand. Let the burst capillaries guide one dragon’s wrath through the body by way of veins full of low resistance. As a half dozen pins collide with a half dozen firing caps, the fractal web of possibility is reduced to a few manageable trajectories. Kick back behind you, catch Jesse in his shoulder. See the cells burst and die, blood pool into a bruise. A small part sacrificed to save the man. Jesse falls forward, out of the path of every bullet.

Gas is expanding in six different cylinders. The man in your grasp doesn’t yet know he’s dead. Turn and feel half your major muscle groups contract. Feel the way the adrenaline is dumped into your body chemistry, like rocket fuel on a house fire. Contract the opposite groups, heaving the still hot corpse at another bounty hunter.

Your optic nerves are too slow to resolve the way the bullets exit their barrels, but they can see the rounds move for you. Drop low, jag left, let the bullets pass you by. Throw your body forward, elbow first, into the chest of another bounty hunter. Feel his sternum crumble, feel living bone shatter into dead calcium. Momentum carries you on, caving a crater into the bounty hunter’s chest. Teeth form out of the miasma of intent swirling through you, and those teeth cleave burning wounds, exposing the delicate meat hiding in the darkness of his chest cavity to air and light.

Open your mouth, and let the flames lick at your teeth. The flames part, and for an instant there is reprieve, there is a gap in the inferno—breathe while the air won’t scorch your lungs to ash.

The screams come late. Sound travels so slowly, trapped as it is in the air. You are already moving again. There are five left. They already know the way, show you what to do. Roll with the avalanche of collapsing superposition. Let it carry your hands into killing blows.

Pivot toward the man struggling under the weight of the first man you killed. Cover the ground but barely touch it as you do. Grab his head in both your hands. His skin burns under your touch. Your skin was already burning. Snap his neck like twisting the cap off a bottle. Breathe too soon, scorch your mouth and throat before they give you the space.

Kick one man’s knee, shattering the joint. He goes limp with the shock of the sudden pain, starts to fall. Snatch the hand holding the pistol and twist until the barrel is under his chin. Squeeze your finger down on top of his, firing his weapon into his own brain pan. Hold still for agonizing microseconds, so the bullet finds its mark.

Behind you, another bullet is about to cut another path through the air. The trajectory is wrong, it’s not aimed at you, it’s aimed at Jesse.

_More_ , you wail to them. You need more, or this will have been for nothing. They assent.

You become _we_.

The body lunges for the one with death in his hands. Part the way for it, let it slip the bonds of space, just a little, so it occupies somewhere else. Atmosphere rushes into the vacated space, adding more vibration to the already agitated air.

Don’t wait for the body to attack, bring wrath down on the one about to kill _him_ , about to kill the lover. Burn him out, watch the futures with him in it fade away. Preen with satisfaction. This is an inflection point, and in the futures where the lover is lost in this moment, the body begins to falter. The path to this place snaps closed.

One begins to run. Chase him down, burn him out too. Take his weapon, and fire it into the neck on the last man, severing his spinal column. The bullet would have been enough, but chase it anyway, just to taste the instant where the lover becomes safe. It’s warm and sweet. The body hums with the memory of sucrose.

Three is a difficult balance to strike. The newest part wants to fill up the body. No. You want to _return_ to the body. The body stumbles, sways, and then comes to rest in front of the lover. Reach for the body, flow into it.

There is something very wrong.

Every nerve screams with pain, lightning up red agony and feeding back hot dissonance. It wasn’t meant for what it did. What you did? What it did.

Wrench back, but part begs to stay. There was a small bright will living in the body, and it wants to go back, to be a man again. There are supposed to be two, not three, and letting part stay shouldn’t be difficult, but demarcation is fuzzy. Remember that there has always been room. There is so much empty space in the body. The fragile latticework of nuclear attraction is like gossamer in the typhoon of entropy. Push further in, despite the agony, hoping each piece returns to the proper place.

It’s too much. The body can’t contain it all, not in this state, not with three minds jockeying for room in a single nervous system. Try to retreat, to hide between the atoms, but the third won’t let go, trapping all in the overburdened meat. The heart jackhammers in the chest, beating as quickly as it can. The delicate pulses of electricity regulating the muscle begin to run together, coming faster than the muscle can obey. It stutters, missing its tempo.

There isn’t time to untangle. Time doesn’t have to be a factor. Pull back, despite the way the third clings, and slide outside, where time can be set aside.

 

* * *

 

The darkness has weight, burns in a way that’s analogous to brightness. It’s more absolute than any you can recall. It’s not quiet, however. There’s singing, a soft, unending duet. It makes the darkness welcoming.

Reach out to see if the dark has texture to accompany the weight. Feel something shift around you. Through you. Relief pours through you, cool like a mountain stream. Relief that’s not your own.

Feel the hot press of two minds against your own, just shy of smothering. Remember the fight. Remember drawing so much of their strength you ceased being separate things. Now you feel the separation. You are a thing unto yourself again.

You don’t know precisely how to feel about that, so try to not feel anything at all.

Fail, because they impart urgency. You don’t belong here, you have a body to call home instead. Jesse is waiting for you there. It is imperative you go back while you can.

Jesse. You’d like to see Jesse. Let them show you the way.

 

* * *

 

Something is pressing on your chest. Something heavy. You ribs creak under the weight, and it hurts. Everything hurts. Try to move your arm, to throw off the weight, and fail. Someone grabs you by the nose and chin, one hand colder than the other, and forces a hot breath down your throat. Taste blood and stale smoke. Sweat drips down onto your face.

Open your eyes. Jesse is leaning over you. He’s panting, opened mouth, and he looks terrified. The dirt and sweat has combined to for a thin film of mud on one cheek, in grim contrast to the blood on the other. Try to say something, manage only a groan. Breathe on your own. It’s agony. Your lungs feel like two slabs of burnt meat fluttering in your chest.

He lifts one hand up. The plastic cuffs are dangling from his wrist, one loop intact and the other mangled. He stares down at you while he hesitates, then he presses his fingers under your jaw. Feel your own pulse in the way your head throbs. His other hand brushes hair out of your face, brushes a tender arc over your cheek.

“What the fuck, Hanzo,” he murmurs. Sigh in response. He leans forward, blocking out the view of anything else, and presses a kiss to your forehead. “Wait here. Don’t move.”

Nod, or at least try. Close your eyes. He walks away, footfalls heavy for him. You suppose that it doesn’t matter. It’s not as if there’s anyone else around to hear. Realize, with some small despair, that you’re going to have to keep breathing. You have a dim memory of a gentle dark, and you wonder if you could hide there, just for a little while.

The low hum of a car is familiar. Jesse must have gotten one of the bounty hunter’s started. The hum grows louder. Hear the click of a door opening, followed by Jesse’s footfalls.

Open your eyes again. Jesse’s face is a hard mask. In this moment, he’s not your partner, the one with chipped-toothed smiles, with infectious laughter, with old-fashioned manners. The one who uses sleight of hand to cheat at cards and sneak chocolates into your jacket pockets. He’s the Blackwatch operative, all cold, tactical pragmatism. This is the Jesse that doesn’t flinch under fire, the one who can put aside all his kinder inclinations to see a mission through.

You are that mission, you realize. Twenty years of training and experience and prowess all brought to bear on you. You know what the love of Jesse as your partner felt like, but you’d never considered the weight of his love as a special operative. It’s strange and familiar all at once. You wonder if anyone else has had this privilege.

He kneels down beside you and slips his arms under your shoulders and knees. Try to hold on to him, to make it easier, but your hands don’t cooperate. He jostles you, sending a dull, hot ache through your ribs. Fail to bite back a groan. He apologizes, but in a way that makes you think he’d have moved you no matter how much it hurt. Don’t hold it against him.

He tucks you into the back seat of a car. Helps you arrange yourself as comfortably as you can. He bunches up his serape and stuffs it under your head. For an instant, the mask slips, and you see bone deep fear. Fear that wasn’t there when he thought he would die. Guilt bubbles up, but not that much. Not enough to regret.

Jesse disappears for a moment. You close your eyes again. Don’t notice when he comes back. All the warning you get before the bite of a biotic injector is his hand on your knee. It’s not worth flinching over. The warmth of it spreads like morphine, dulling the misery of your overtaxed body.

Jesse slips into the driver’s seat and starts keying something into the autopilot. The car starts rolling forward, and he tips down the rear-view mirror until you can see his eyes. He reaches back between the seats, catches one of your hands in his own.

“I got it from here, darlin’.”

Believe him.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm back on my  
> < jean-ralphio voice >  
>  _bullshit_.
> 
> There's a sequel [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16838776).


End file.
